Unofficial news and tips about Google

October 31, 2011

Google Reader's New Interface

The new Google Reader interface is finally here and it also brings some functional changes: all the social features are removed and replaced by a Google +1 button. It's important to note that clicking the +1 button only adds the page to your Google Profile and you need to click the "share on Google+" box to share the page with your friends.

This means that the "share" and "like" buttons have been removed, you can no longer follow other Google Reader users and you can no longer read their shared items inside Google Reader. Folders and tags can no longer be public, the blogroll widget and the associated public page will stop being updated, while discussions are a thing of the past.

"When you find interesting items on Reader, you can choose to share them on Google+ publicly, or with a certain circles or friends. You can also add a comment in the sharebox to your shared items. Your comment will show up along with the item you've recommended in the streams of those you've shared with. Adding a note when sharing an item is a great way to let people know why you find a particular item interesting, relevant, or funny. To share an item with a note, just click the +1 button from underneath the item. You'll then be given the option to include any comments you might have in the Google+ share box. Your +1 will be public, but your notes in the share box will be only show up for circles and friends you've selected," explains Google.

What happened to all the posts you've shared or liked until today? You can export them from Reader's settings page, along with the items from people you follow, your discussions, your followers and the list of people you follow. Google offers two exporting options: JSON Activity Stream and a custom Google Reader JSON format, but they're not very useful without a software that parses them.

Unfortunately, all the items +1'd from Google Reader are treated like any other pages and there's no way to read the posts shared by your friends in Google Reader. In fact, there's no way to create a Google+ circle for the people you've followed in Google Reader. The new interface doesn't even offer keyboard shortcuts for sharing posts: Shift+s, Shift+d and "l" no longer work. The integration with Google+ is just an afterthought, instead of a proper replacement for Reader's sharing feature.

Update: Mihai Parparita, who worked on the Google Reader team, puts the changes into perspective and says that "Reader is on its fourth social model", after using Google Talk contacts, allowing you to manage your friends from the Reader interface and integrating with Google Buzz.

too much unused space. too much contrast. too big buttons, menus. everything seems wrong with this reader. i will use it anyway. however, it was not a nice integration. i don't like it. i don't care about socalizing features. they weren't useful either. but this reading experience is just fucked up. just too little space to view post, seriously?

I'm surprised they didn't add any real new functionality. The early years of Google and Gmail were full of "wow!", now it's more "blah!". I was hoping something like ifttt to generate cool new rss mashups.

Facebook is really doing a better job of focusing on the user like their new follow and comment options.

Wrong decision! Really disappointed!Google Reader was just great!, now it is only yet another google+ slave which makes things more complicated! The "share" and the "like" button were great! I loved to follow people, to share items with them and read what they were sharing with me and discover new people through the "liked" items. But yes, nobody is taking care of Google+, therefore let's involve (actually, let's force) greader users into a product which does not appeal to people, that's the truth! And maybe Google+ will be discontinued as Wave did, and what about Google Reader then?Google Reader was great as it was!

I was excited about being able to share items on G+, right up until i read that i had to first "+1" and item which Google tells me is "public". Too bad they don't define public anywhere. So if 22k people +1 twitter how do i get a list of everyone who ever +1'd twitter.com? Makes 0 sense. I guess i'll just keep copying url's to G+ until they fix sharing in reader and make +1 do something useful.

@andima What? What are you talking about? Google+ is amazing, and lots of people are using it. It is in no way like Wave. If you like following people and sharing, why would you not use Google+? Or are you just another one of these people who are technological cretins who hate Google+ for no reason?

I don't think there is one thing about this redesign that's an improvement. Did they not do any user studies on these changes because there is not one positive comment on this page. And unlike most of their other redesigns, there is no way to revert back to the old style. I spend the majority of my time online using Reader but I will now be looking for a replacement. Anyone have any suggestions?

I just care about two things here: Cannot collapse the left pane. And I want an option to make the layout "cozy" like I can in Gmail. Far too much wasted space on a app that I use for rapid info-surfing.

I have almost to agree with the majority of the comments above: If it has not broken, the recent changes put Reader one step away from being broken. For some time now I was waiting for the introduction of interface customization to Reader, at least like Gmail has with its themes, but what I get is the removal of, albeit not popular, functional features like the Share mechanism and the same interface that stupefied Google Docs.

I hope the Reader team hear the cry of the users. Is Bloglines still around?

I was hoping you guys were joking. There is SOO much useless empty space. It looks like it was designed by someone who only had a ruler which smallest measurement was 1 foot. 1 Foot padding here, 1 Foot Margin Here.. You can't even collapse the top half. I searched for ages for a "Classic View" which you guys tend to do.. since you can never get a design correct first time. Put a "view classic mode" and see what percentage of people "who use it daily, if not hourly" turn it back to classic. Then you will know your success rate with the new design.!

So many have said it already, but I agree. Too too too much wasted space. Also, (at least when viewed through Safari) when I click on a subscription, I see nothing to distinguish between read and unread items. This seems like a gross oversight.

I was hoping that we would have seen some real integration between Google+ and Google Reader, not just the addition of the new plus one button.

I would have liked to have seen stuff like Google flip integrated into Google Reader or a more magazine style. But may be this will come when they release Propeller or it could be another case of mobiles getting an more interesting interface than there PC counter parts Also Spark and Save search from Google + would have been nice.

An I think the ability for people to transfere there friends lists over to Google + was an essential feature.

Once, there was a choice between Faceb00k and Google. Now it's Faceb00k vs. facepalm.There were certain negative reviews on the new Google design when Google Docs UI was updated. Wasting more than 1/3 of useful screen space is not getting you anywhere.Now, ruining the Reader... where do you think it will get Google? All you do is pushing your users to look for an alternatives.Hope you are not going to mess with Calendar and Gmail.

An improvement to the 'new' reader would be adding the functionality to subscribe to a feed of your friend's +1s. That would at least PARTIALLY replace the sharing function, of course without context but it would be a start.

I also don't like having my +1's listed under my public name. To wit, I have changed a few letters of my name to unicode characters so my name reads the same but my shares aren't easily found by googling me.

It seems in order to share in google plus, I have to +1 the article first. So now I have to *publicly* 'like' an article in order to share it on my *private* google+ stream?

For instance, I might want to highlight a *comment* on a news article by supporters of Gaddafi being killed.

I could do that in share in reader, by highlighting the comment, sharing it via note in reader and commenting on the share. It would still link to the article, but my comment would be given context.

Now I can only plus +1 the whole article. BUT... perhaps I don't agree with the article? +1 generally shows a 'like' or agreement. I now have to think about what I +1, knowing it will be publicly attributed to me and taken out of the context, potentially giving people the wrong impression about my beliefs.

I agree that the white spacing is way too much. Also, why do we need a pretty fat (and mostly empty bar) above the content that says what folder/feed we're reading, isn't that what the left navigation should do? Lastly, and most importantly, I'm noticing in expanded view, the new version seems far slower when flipping through the list with "j/k".

Bizarre color contrasts, awkward current selection choice, and huge amounts of white space... terrible choices. I pray Google condenses the design, or at least give me the option to revert back to the old layout.

This isn't just about how good or bad it looks. Some people were using the "share" feature to supply websites with news feeds. That is completely gone now, without warning. People were relying on Google Reader for more than just reading the news, it was a tool for websites and web developers as well.

Its ugly.Why is there 2 inches of wasted space at the top of my screen?I used to use an extension that had pretty themes, favicons, and nested folders. That made the old version nice. Now this - I may have to find a different application.

There's not enough actual reading area left on my 1366x768 laptop. I know I can go full screen, but like to keep the subscription list on the left - it really needs a hotkey to collapse the rather large header area

"What happened to all the posts you've shared or liked until today? You can export them from Reader's settings page, along with the items from people you follow, your discussions, your followers and the list of people you follow. Google offers two exporting options: JSON Activity Stream and a custom Google Reader JSON format."

The amount of wasted space is staggering, about 1/3 of the vertical space is useless. Do the designers at Google use vertical monitors? Most displays are widescreen, yet the layout wastes the few vertical pixels we have.

Does anyone on the design team actually use the product?!?! Now I can only look at half of the entries on a screen that I used to. This change stinks. Make it more configurable please I loved this app. I need more lines per screen. And despite the new spacing it actually harder to read

You all may not like it, but you all should have been expecting it. Why would Google maintain two separate, redundant content-sharing paradigms? Why wouldn't they redesign Reader's visuals to match the rest of Google?

Without offering comment on the merits of the changes at all, I find the shock and dismay surprising in and of itself.

Slower, less ergonomic, friends list not found ?! Why changing things when they are doing good ??!Let's have a try for a couple of days, then maybe we could go back to old version via labs.. (is there any labs for GReader btw ?)

Ron, maybe you wouldn't be so shocked at the dismay out there if you were running a website which had a feature that relied upon the Google News Feed being available publicly. Don't talk if you have no idea what you're speaking about.

The new Reader is definitely SLOWER. It's as if the +1 script or whatever is causing lots of little loading hangs.

Too much whitespace. It can't be said enough. This shouldn't have been released without density options (which I hope are on the way).

Frankly this design looks unfinished. Even the logo is a holdover from the previous version.

As salsa wrote, they just broke my favorite thing on the internet.

*** Any suggestions for other web-based feed readers? Choice seems slim in this area now. GReader swallowed up so many users over the past 4 or 5 years that lots of competitors have vanished. Bloglines, which I used 'til '08 seems to be gone. Now where do we go? I could spend some time "fixing" Reader with a custom userstyle and some Scriptish scripts, but at this point I think I'd rather spend that time investigating other feed readers.

Pros:-I like that the UI look is similar across the Google services that I use with this update.-It is great that the left hand selection area is now scrolling all the way and not in small portions which was causing it to be a pain to use on my laptop due to it's smaller resolution.-Like the gmail web update, this looks ok on a 1920x1080 screen desktop monitor.

Cons:-Needs a denser theme like gmail web has which also could be a bit denser still in my taste. The problem is more visible with a 1366x768 laptop resolution.-Sluggish on my laptop (Core i3 U380, 4GB RAM, Intel graphics) when browsing through the feeds. I don't think that the laptop is underpowered for this use at least. :)

I shared to Buzz occasionally but I didn't really use the sharing except via email so I didn't find Buzz sharing ending that much of a loss myself. G+ sharing was a nice addition for me as I was already using that.

Non of the top toolbar tools work like the "mark all as read" or "feed settings" and even the "reload" arrow thingy. NON WORK! I love "read by mouse" but that does not work either! I just HATE this! Please give people the option of going back to the classic UI? Please, I beg you Google!

The lack of color is bland and also creates too much contrast, and like everyone else I'm finding there's too much whitespace and things are just generally harder to read. Major disappointment overall!

Ron, save your condescending response for someone else. Not everyone is a web design pro, and Google itself offered a widget to place the news feed on your website (though what I had on the website I manage was fully customized with some help that I received). As for the services being free...Google makes BILLIONS OF DOLLARS off of its users. Even if we are not "paying" Google in terms of a subscription, we are its money-makers. To think otherwise is naive. Stop being a Google apologist!

Notes and NOte in Reader was THE best way I maintained and bookmarked sites and webpages around the web -easily tagging them and grouping them as I wanted.

All of that hard work as been undone in an instant!

and don't try and tell me your JSON export is any use as I have already tried to parse it and the tags and categories are a complete mess with lots of extra text append on the front making them unusable!

Is there a way to have the old interface back?In the new interface there is TOO MUCH UNUSED SPACE!Did anyone of the dev team tried to use the new interface in a 10" netbook?

I have a screen res of 1024x600 pixel, even when going fullscreen the top -useless- gogle reader top bar use 254pixel, leaving only 356 pixel for the posts. This is a nonsense.

In the old interface there was a clear mark around the "current" post, and it was very clear where was the start and the end of any post; now it only an unclear mesh of black text on a white background, I'm having difficulty understanding where each post begin/end.

And please, give us 2 separate button for +1 and "share", these are not the same things.+1 it's like a bookmark, mainly for me; "share" is for the others, my contact, people in my circle, everybody when I share publicly.

And please, again, give us the option to get the old interface back, it was much more clear, nice, and useful.

I agree with the masses here. The new interface is horrible. There's too much wasted white space and too little color differentiation. I haven't been using "Share" features before but I'm still considering a switch unless they roll back or come up with something which is actually usable.

I understand I might not like the new Reader just because I am not used to it. But why not give us the option to continue using old look. Or - an option to customize the current look.. It is too white and space is not used effectively. Dislike!

I've survived Google "improving" all of the other products I use to date, but this is painful. Like "The BeadleMachine", I had bookmarks saved in the notes section - are they gone forever? How can I get them back if possible?

You have taken a fantastic product and made integrated it in such a way that you made it worse not better.

Sharing with Notes was one way that I constantly updated my website with links to stories , with the commentary as to my thoughts on them. I cant see an easy way to do this now since all I can do is share into Google+ and there doesnt appear to be an RSS Feed to pull for those shared + 1 items.

I cant find the people I followed in Reader and add them to a circle and expect them to post to that Circle ( did realise Circles DO NOT WORK ) in where a Persons\Reader Circle as a default for every user would have been a boon unless they add me to their circle I cant see their content so easily ( again Circles terribly broken for sharing and not working at all as hoped )

You seem to be walking away from making feeds accessible or segregated. Where Reader was working as a newsclipping tool for many of my clients they are now at a loss as to how to adapt their business process to make this work with Google+ as it is simply too alien and foreign , and have I mentioned Broken !

Finally can we take it that Googles new Customer Service mantra is "If you dont like it , you are free to leave" if so I must award you the Golden Cahones of 2011 for the most ballsy customer service attitude in encouraging clients to stick with you.

dear google reader team - you have totally broken the fav thing on the internet, google reader used to be brilliant, fast, condensed - now it's full of white space, slow as all heck and a major bug = the mark all as read "sometimes" work; only way to correct is to reload the whole page.

on my laptop with firefox i used to get 20+ items in the main view, now i get 12 or 16 in full screen; what a disappointment!

it's like gmail, give the user the choice of themes. bring back the old design for those that wish to use it - agree with all the posts here, horrible choice google reader team.

While I don't like the new look, I guess I can live with it and get used to it over time.

What I find disruptive is the removal of the bar that was used to hide/retrieve the navigation sidebar. It was really usefull for some feeds that require more screen than others, a quick hide and after reading a quick retrieve.

Another thing I noticed is that it seems the interface drags a lot while handling feeds with lots of unread posts, something that didn't use to happen with the old design.

This interface is wrong in so many ways. It's not designed for desktop use, which is where I mostly spend my time on reading news. There's no way to hide the "header section" with all this search bars and buttons, which would be nice feature. Aside from the looks it's just working wrong. For example: my settings include startup page set as "All elements", despite this fact reader loads "Home page". But now the best part, clicking on "All elements" and guess what? Nothing, "Home page" content remains.

I loved the old reader, it did what I wanted how I wanted it done.I am really disappointed in the way google decided to treat its Reader. I'll stick it out till I find something better, either way it will not be like the old reader.Poor job google on this one.

why the FUCK did they mess with the reader - I have got a VERY angry wife, and now I've got to find an alternative for her (I've got better things to do) - give us the option to choose the old UI you fucking idiots!!!

The complete silence from Google, with no responses to journalists nor engagement in their own help forums, is awful. Together with the blog announcement of the "improvements" that they love so much, with the invitation to leave if you don't like it, indicates that they won't be budging on this one. After the fuss about Picasa / Google Profile / privacy, which they rightly reversed, they obviously know that they can't defend these changes reasonably.

No no no no. There are people I shared with on Reader who are NOT on Google Plus, and never will be! Some, I never even knew their real name! Now they're gone, and I have no idea how to track them down again!

This is awful. You took what is probably the site I visit most on the Web and made it useless to me. Thanks, Google. I don't care at all about the aesthetic changes (well, maybe a little) but the sharing features are what made it valuable. Especially being able to see all of my friend's shared reader items in one place, free of all the other crap that shows up in a + feed.

One of the most used features of my blog was my "news of interest" sidebar where I used Google Reader's sharing function to tag articles I thought my readers would find interesting. Can't find a way to do that with Reader at the moment.

If you use a browser tool that lets you add custom CSS to a site's pages (I'm using the Personalized Web extension for Chrome), these CSS rules will get rid of the enormous menu bars at the top and give you most of your screen back. I've rarely used those buttons up there anyway, and it's simple enough to disable the extension if I need to get at them for some reason.

The new google reader interface is THE WORST change (not one of worst) made by google. This link BELOW illustrates the reason why it SUCKS if you can read chinese.http://www.williamlong.info/archives/2871.html

Summary1. Too much wasted non-content zone and space 2. button "Like"、"Share" and "Share with Note" are gone, and force user to use google+. 3. Only share the abstract of items instead of full article. Chinese users used to use google reader to bypass the block by GFW. Now we can only read the abstract!!!!

Please PUT THE OLD GOOGLE READ BACK AND FIRE THE DESIGNER OF NEW INTERFACE

In the past I just had to click on the dropdown box containing all the maps and I could enter some text to easily focus to the map I wanted to search in. Now I have to scroll whole the way down with the mouse to find the map I want. Really terrible.

It is normal that people are afraid of a new layout but usually after some time they get used to it and would not even consider to go back to the old layout.

Although the layout is cleaner in this case, I see waste of space and loss of functionality. So that is not a positive evolution.

Would you at least tell me how many unread messages there are for each site when I go to that entry so I don't have to play guessing games. I could live with it if you would just put that feature back somewhere. I still hate it and all of the whiteness gives me major headaches. I hope someone from Google is actually paying attention to what we are writing.

Pleeease, give us back the old sharing mechanism! I had a few friends and we were sharing and reading each other stuff directly from google reader, and now? I don't use google+ i dont want to switch to it only for this!

I don't care about the missing social features; I never used them anyway.

I HATE the new design.

I HATE the enormous header at the top of the screen.

I HATE that all my feed names are cut off in the left panel.

I HATE that all color has been leached from the UI, making it much more difficult to read.

Like everybody else posting here, I probably spent >75% of my time browsing the internet in Google Reader, and you just made it much worse.

How could this debacle have happened? Doesn't Google use focus groups? I know you're desperately trying to get people to use Google+, and that's fine. The proper response is to add +1 buttons to the old interface... or at least offer users the choice to use the new UI or not, like you did with Gmail.

I like the the new UI in the blogger settings but not digging it in reader. Sure hope gmail doesn't end up looking like this. Needs color to separate the posts. Way too much black and white for me. Please add themes to reader!

Ugh. Why does Google suddenly think monochrome interfaces are more usable? They're not! It makes it much more difficult for our eyes to find important features, boundaries, groupings etc. I suppose that's likely the reason that you had waste so much space on the screen -- without colours to differentiate different areas you had to use copious amounts of whitespace instead.

You did the same thing to Google Docs (fortunately, we still have the option, for now, to revert back to the previous version.)

I use(d) Google Reader DAILY/HOURLY! I can't anymore. It is truly UNREADABLE to me now. Please give me the option of the old interface. Way easier to read. This was a truly really bad change. I'm going to need an alternative if this stays this way for long as a Reader is necessary to my workday. But I CAN NOT READ THIS WELL!

This blows. I know alot of people have complained about issues at the top, which obviously is horrible. But theres alot of wasted space to the right aswell. If you have the list view, where you just see one line entries, it goes all the way, but if like me you have the expanded view, then none of the articles go all the way,and you have about a third of a page worth of blank space to the right!!!

Another thing was that I'd like to atleast be able to move the divider pane between the list of subscriptions and the articles. That way I will atleast be able to reclaim part of that white space by expanding the list of feeds so atleast im able to see them.

The +1 etc social features didn't matter to me. But i cant understand why they took out shared feeds. I didn't use them that much but they were great once in a while to be able to see what interesting things other people are reading.

I also haven't found any userstyles that differentiate each story's title from the body. I'd like to see a light blue background color like the old google reader, but it's just in a larger font and bold.

More than 300 000 items scanned in two years, about 6000 shared. And now they just broke it. I just could not believe, and seeked for information. It's so wierd.Please, return sharing.And of course I hope that the design is going to be more user-friendly. stranage that we're telling this to google.

Wow, you guys continue to ruin everything you had. The new design is laughably bad in almost every way. Your use of color, space, and contrast is terrible - can you not afford to hire designers who are any good? Please give us a way back to the old (ugly but reasonable) UI.

I hate it. Just like the new GMail interface. In the same category as new Coke. It wasn't broken before. In fact, it used to have a nice "desktop" look. Now it looks like a HS student's web 2 week long project.

Ugh I hate this update. Way too much wasted space, I liked seeing as much as possible condensed in one screen. Now I only see a few articles and have to scroll. I hate the gray, the colors are just difficult to read through quickly. I can't even describe how disappointed I am. I just hope we get an option to switch back, otherwise I will probably look for another reader.

Awful in every way. I can't think of a single thing that looks like an improvement. I guess I won't be using the desktop browser interface for Google Reader anymore (unless an option is added to bring back the "classic" UI). Please, Google, just don't screw up the mobile iPad interface too.

Looks like Google is taking a page from Netflix and Bank of America when it comes to making changes that do nothing more than infuriate their customer base. Hopefully they leave OPML long enough for everyone to switch to a different service. If I wanted a monochrome interface, I'd by a monitor from the 1980's.

I had been following a list of articles from my friends. Building the list on plus again is a pain. Why the hell should I use google products if you are going to force everyone to integrate with plus. Reader *had* the best RSS feed reading facility. Had been using since it was launched. Total fail. Instead, you could have had a small +1 in the Reader interface. This one is so screwed up and messy. Thank you, smart work. Keep it up. You look more and more like another M$ to us.